What Really Affects Children’s Health — Beyond Chemical Fears?

Ban artificial food dyes from already-labeled junk food? Sure! Want to scrutinize glyphosate? Great! We’re already doing that—and will continue to do so. As farmers, we want to know if something is causing harm. But here’s one of the biggest movements MAHA is forgetting.

For the record, I commend the movement to make America healthy again. We do need to scrutinize practices like glyphosate, be willing to change when research demands it, and continue to improve agricultural practices for humans and animals alike—something farmers have been doing for generations (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2025).

But MAHA is missing crucial pieces of the puzzle. We need to focus on real issues, real variables, and real solutions. If we truly want to make America healthy again, it starts with our children.

Parents aren’t wrong to be concerned. Chronic disease rates have risen over the past several decades. Conversations about fertility, anxiety, ADHD, obesity, and autoimmune conditions are everywhere. When you’re raising children in that environment, of course you’re going to ask what’s changed.

Scrutiny is healthy. Asking hard questions is responsible parenting.

But when fear narrows our focus to a single chemical, we risk overlooking larger, measurable shifts in how children live, eat, sleep, and move. If we want real answers, we have to be willing to look at the full picture.

Over the last 50 years, childhood has changed dramatically. Free outdoor play has declined as well as daily physical activity and sleep. Screen time is up exponentially. Family mealtimes, cooked at home from scratch has declined. These are not small changes, but major culture shifts.

By the 1960s, modern developmental psychology—shaped by thinkers like John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Maria Montessori—was transforming how we understood childhood. They studied cognitive stages, emphasized child-centered learning, and demonstrated the benefits of social interaction, independence, and guided play (Janssen & Katzmarzyk, 2018). By the early 1990s, kindergarten in the U.S. was largely play-based and aligned with modern discovery.

Then the U.S., feeling competitive pressure of falling behind and influenced by political shifts toward standards and accountability, began to change. Schools became more academic at younger ages. Recess declined starting in the 1980s. Then came the “No Child Left Behind Act." Academic pressure soared. Test scores began determining funding, job security, and teacher evaluation. Classroom structure shifted. Play shrank. Test prep increased.

All because play doesn’t produce data points (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2013).

Fast forward to today, 13% of U.S. schools don’t even have recess, and those that do often limit it to 1–2 short breaks per day (Harvard Medical School, 2022).

Meanwhile, Finland took the opposite path. In the 1970s, it embraced developmental research and applied it across every classroom. They even changed the formal learning age to age 7—the age when children’s hands are physically ready to hold and write with a pencil. Play-based learning dominates early education, standardized testing is minimized. As teachers are required to hold master’s degrees, they operate with strong professional trust and low political interference (Hirvonen et al., 2023; Wikipedia, 2026). Finland aligned policy with developmental science, not politics.

Research today confirms the early findings: play and child-centered learning foster healthier development. Politics are slow to change, and it's still more complicated than what I've made it out to be. The U.S. system, influenced by funding, accountability, and political pressures, has helped in economic terms—entrepreneurship, higher education competitiveness, and innovation—but it has also contributed to higher rates of childhood obesity, diabetes, ADHD, anxiety, and other chronic diseases (U.S. National Institutes of Health, 2008).

Over the past four decades, childhood obesity rates in the United States have more than tripled, according to the CDC. During that same time period, children’s daily physical activity has declined, screen time has increased significantly, and sleep duration has steadily decreased.

Ultra-processed foods now make up more than half of the average American child’s calorie intake, according to research published in peer-reviewed nutrition journals. These foods are consistently associated with higher risks of obesity, metabolic dysfunction, and inflammation.

Regulatory agencies including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the European Food Safety Authority have repeatedly concluded that glyphosate, when used according to labeled directions, is unlikely to pose a cancer risk to humans.

Ironically, refining our school structure, reintroducing play, and aligning schools with developmental science could reduce many chronic health issues that people often blame on glyphosate or artificial food dyes. Screen time alone compounds the problem (Stiglic & Viner, 2025). Glyphosate, in reality, shows minimal direct impact on these population-level trends (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2025), but of course it will continue to be studied. Glyphosate is complex and ongoing debate and ongoing study—but it is rarely the main driver of chronic disease. Population-level childhood health trends align far more strongly with lifestyle and dietary shifts than with a single agricultural input.

If we remove one agricultural chemical tomorrow, would those trends reverse? Children’s health is shaped by layers of environmental influence. Focusing on one factor can distract us from broader drivers that we can measure and influence today.

The difference between Finland and the U.S. has affected children’s metabolism, mood, and attention span. Lifestyle and education policies have a far greater population-level impact than glyphosate exposure.

Our children’s health is too important to reduce to a single villain. We can continue scrutinizing agricultural practices. We should. But we must also examine how modern childhood has shifted — away from movement, sunlight, dirt, independence, and real-world play.

Now the question should be: what if the key to making America healthy again isn’t banning a chemical, but giving our kids the childhood they actually need to thrive?

References

American Academy of Pediatrics. (2013). The crucial role of recess in school. Pediatrics, 131(1), 183–188. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/131/1/183/30893/The-Crucial-Role-of-Recess-in-School

Harvard Medical School. (2022). Free play shapes a child’s brain and bestows lifetime benefits. Harvard Magazine. https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/free-play-shapes-childs-brain-and-bestows-lifetime-benefits

Hirvonen, J., et al. (2023). Education system in Finland. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385138105_Education_System_in_Finland

International Agency for Research on Cancer. (2015). IARC monographs on the evaluation of carcinogenic risks to humans: Glyphosate. https://www.iarc.who.int/featured–news/media-centre-iarc-news-glyphosate/

Janssen, I., & Katzmarzyk, P. (2018). Healthy play and cognitive development in children. ScienceDirect. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763418305116

Stiglic, N., & Viner, R. (2025). Effects of screen time on children and adolescents: A systematic review of reviews. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10062

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2025). Glyphosate | human health risk and regulatory review. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/glyphosate

U.S. National Institutes of Health. (2008). Childhood obesity and health trends in the United States. PMC. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12235530

Wikipedia contributors. (2026, February 18). Education in Finland. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Finland